Snapchat cautioned its 100 million active users on Tuesday morning to stay away from any and all apps that claim to work with its messaging service.

Snapchat, which lets users share a photo or video that’s deleted soon after the recipient sees it, has been under fire since last week. A third party-service that connected to Snapchat and allowed “snap” recipients to back up the photos and videos sent to them was hacked. More than 13 gigabytes of data — most of them photos that Snapchat users had stored on the third-party site – were stolen and made public, including tens of thousands of sexually explicit images. The hack affected about 200,000 Snapchat users.

Snapchat blamed the third-party services for putting Snapchat users at risk in a new blog post today. “It takes time and a lot of resources to build an open and trustworthy third-party application ecosystem,” Snapchat wrote today. “That’s why we haven’t provided a public API to developers and why we prohibit access to the private API we use to provide our service.”

This is the second time since the breach was reported that Snapchat has said third-party Snapchat services were at fault, and that users assume multiple risks by using them. On Friday, Snapchat told CNET News in a statement that its users were “victimized” by using third-party Snapchat services, which often back up the photos and videos posted to Snapchat without the sender’s consent.

Snapchat told CNET News said that third-party use of its API is, “a practice that we expressly prohibit in our Terms of Use” because they “compromise our users’ security.”

Read the Full Article: Source – c|net
http://www.cnet.com/news/snapchat-warns-users-unsanctioned-apps-cant-be-trusted/

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